Our School Area in 2010

No cleaning at all happened for these updated photos. These are the ridgy-didge , warts and all photos. The “real” school room. Brace yourself. “Better Homes and Garden” will not be contacting me after seeing these…hehehehe.

You’ll notice that our school room isn’t so much of a room as it is an “area”. It’s open plan so this space is actually our kitchen, dining room, family room and school area. It works perfectly as we can spread ourselves out and find a space away from each other, or snuggle up close, or I can work on something in the kitchen while overseeing my little students.

We bought this house because of this great space. I still love it.

Did you notice there are two tables in this room? We bought the one in the corner for homeschooling. But look what it turned into…

…a catch all!

Oh well. I need a catch all. Where else could I pile up all this paper?!

Here’s where we usually do our school work. It’s a bigger table so we have more elbow room.

Ah you might notice the junk at the end of the table. Isn’t that a tip-off to guests that we are homeschoolers? If they hadn’t already noticed the piles of books, wall timeline and obscene amount of stationery lying around the house.

The other well used school location in our home is this armchair. It’s a new feature just this year and it’s my favourite thing in our school area aside from students and books.

Note the wicker baskets beside the chair. The smaller basket contains our daily reading material and the bigger basket is the stuff that’s in the holding queue waiting for its turn to be read.

All the stuff on the red mat is leftover from our reading session. While I read aloud the boys amuse themselves with something quiet. So I suppose the red mat is a key feature of our school area too.

The shelves you can see behind the easel (which we rescued from hubby’s school and gave a lovely lick of paint) were an old tv stand. I stash various quiet activities in these shelves that the boys can do on the mat. My plan was to rotate the stuff around but honestly I think I’ve rotated it twice. Oh well. It was the thought that counted.

These are some of our homeschooling cupboards (there are also two more on the back side of the kitchen bench). Cupboards with doors are vital!! Every homeschooling family needs a place to stash and hide their stuff.

Notice the little red drawers on the top of the shelves…these contain our stationery supplies. A drawer for pencils (most of which are broken or blunt…of course!!), a drawer for pens (half of which work…heheeh), a drawer for colouring pencils and a drawer for scissors, erasers, glue sticks and other important stuff. I love this drawer. One of my best ideas.

Oh and that hole is the wall allows you to look through the back hall to my laundry. So I can wash or iron while supervising my boys. Please read, “I could“…it’s the possibility that’s important. Hehehe. Okay, sometimes I fold but rarely do I iron.

This set of roller drawers was going to be a great idea but…well…it’s another catch all. Hehehe. The wicker baskets on the top actually work better. I have one for the boys’ notebooks (each with a coloured sticker on the spine so I know which is what) and one for their textbooks and resource stuff we are using at present. This way, when I’m planning, I can just pick up the basket and cart it to the comfiest location in the house. You see, the roller drawers were “supposed” to work this way but because there’s so much space in there I ended up stashing any old thing in there (now there’s NO space in there) and it’s now so heavy it won’t roll.

We’ve got a computer and electric piano in our school area too. But to be honest, neither is used much. Everyone prefers to use the whiz bang computers in the study over this old clunker. And the piano gives the illusion that we study music…right?

Oh yes, can’t miss our new timeline. At present it’s working well. We’ve added a stash of new cards on it recently.

Windy days aren’t good though. Gotta get out the pliers and close the hooks on those pegs.

Oh that’s our school area at the end of the hall. And the door on the right is our art supply cupboard. It’s actually neat at present.

So there you go…our school area a la naturale. I hope it’s not too shockingly truthful.

Rest assured it’s clean now. Two boys wanted to use the computer this afternoon. That’s called “Mother Leverage”.

“Sure you can use the computer IF you clean the mat and vacuum it”. Hehehe.

4 responses to “Our School Area in 2010”

hello Tracey,
long time no annoyance from me 😉
well we have finally arrived in Perth, AND have a house to move into on Friday yayy!! 🙂
I have always loved your school space, and am actually relieved you haven’t changed much as i don’t think my brain could process anymore information at this point, but then again, that means i don’t have anymore great ideas to ‘steal’ 😉
I even only viewed homes here that have similar spaces , and thankfully we have found one that will work hopefully as well as yours.

Can’t wait till i can catch up with our blog so you can get a peek at our space LOL

Oh boy does my house get into a mess. I just don’t share it often. It’s a good excuse for cleaning if I have to take a photo for the blog! Hehehehe. But rest assured there is plenty of mess. I just can’t share it all the time for fear that you may go screaming in the opposite direction, like I usually do.

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About Me

I am a homeschooling mother of two boys, aged 14 and 12 years. We live in Australia and have never sent our children to school...except to visit with their Daddy, my Dh. He is a school teacher (as I was too, a long time ago).

"A house without books is like a room without windows. No man has a right to bring up his children without surrounding them with books, if he has the means to buy them. It is a wrong to his family. Children learn to read by being in the presence of books. The love of knowledge comes with reading and grows upon it. And the love of knowledge, in a young mind, is almost a warrant against the inferior excitement of passions and vices." ~Horace Mann